A Study on Foreign Visitors' Psychological Evaluation of Tourist Landscapes

Abstract

In Japan, where declining birth rates and an ageing population make expanding domestic demand difficult, expectations for the tourism industry have grown in recent years. There is an increasingly urgent need to identify landscapes that elicit high psychological evaluations, particularly effective for promoting to foreign tourists and enhancing travel satisfaction. The Architectural Environment Laboratory at Hiroshima University has long pursued cross-cultural comparative research examining differences in psychological evaluation of landscapes. Here, I present recent research findings specifically examining differences between Japanese and Chinese subjects regarding tourism landscapes.
First, the results from an experiment presenting only simple visual information are presented. Next, the results from an experiment adding textual information to the visual information are discussed. Finally, the results from an experiment where subjects were subsequently asked to actually visit the tourist destinations represented by the tourist landscapes are described. It is concluded that evaluations of tourist destinations are significantly influenced by the extent of knowledge and understanding the subject possesses about that destination.